A site about the radio listening hobby and my activities therein - longwave, mediumwave, shortwave, FM, and television DXing. A site about the radio listening hobby in all its forms, or at least the forms that interest me.

I am also a licenced amateur radio operator, callsign VE3LXL. Information about my amateur radio station is found on my station website.

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Digital TV Loggings

I've occasionally dabbled in TV DXing over the years and now that over-the-air television is transitioning to digital, I decided to give digital TV DXing a try. That was one reason I bought that Tivax converter last month. Another, of course, was just that I wanted to see what was available to watch on digital TV. On the latter count, the results greatly exceeded my expectations.

I'm not sure how much DXing is going to be possible on digital TV. A month isn't enough time to get a good feel for it, especially as there hasn't been much good propagation lately. What I have seen so far is that, using my home-made TV antenna from my 12th floor apartment balcony, I get all the Toronto and Hamilton stations without fail; the Buffalo stations are present most of the time, and stations from Rochester NY are often present (maybe a third of the time). Beyond that, the only DX I've got is WSYR TV from Syracuse, NY, which has put in an appearance a couple of times. I also saw, once, poorly, a station from Jamestown, NY, but that was before I started logging digital TV, so it isn't in the log yet.

Here's what I've logged. Dates and times in UTC (subtract 4 hours to get local Toronto time). Each subchannel of a station is logged separately. There are two channels listed: RFC (RF Channel; the actual TV channel the station broadcasts on), and DC (Display Channel; the channel number that the station is displayed as). This list is basically a list of the digital TV stations you can expect to see here in Toronto.